Friday, June 13, 2014

The Right-Wing Media is a Trough Urinal: Told You So. 'Accuracy in Media' Says that the Las Vegas Shooters Were Really 'Left-wing Liberals'

As a reminder, I am scheduled to be on Ring of Fire Radio this weekend. The show can be listened to here.

I would like to thank the donors to our fundraiser here on WARN. Once again, folks have shown so much generosity and kindness. We started off 200 dollars short of our goal. The remaining amount is now 50 dollars. Fingers crossed, I will be able to pull the begging bowl back in by the end of this weekend. If you can donate, and are able to, please throw a few bits of silver or gold or copper into the pile, it would be very much appreciated. WARN is love. WARN is also work. WARN is also fun.

Most importantly, folks should try to support WARN because I am often ahead of the curve in my analysis of current events and politics...and I share those analyses here and elsewhere without advertising, payment, or compensation.

Right-wing media "watchdog" and "advocacy" group Accuracy in Media (what a misleading name!) took the bone dangled in front of them: apparently, Jerad and Amanda Miller are actually "Left-wing" "liberals" because they support the legalization of marijuana, and any effort to connect them to movement conservatism is a ploy and trick by the "liberal media".

Cliff Kincaid offers up the following Right-wing comedy-propaganda:

John Avlon’s dishonest column on the cop-killers in Las Vegas should be studied by journalism students as an example of how to exploit a tragedy for political purposes. It is a shame he gets on CNN as an “analyst,” which gives him undeserved authority and prestige, when he deliberately confuses and misleads people.

In this case, he tried to blame conservatives for the murders of two policemen.

His Daily Beast column carried two titles, one of them being, “The Bonnie and Clyde of Ultra-Right Hate.”

He said Jerad and Amanda Miller killed two metro cops while shouting, “This is a revolution!,” and then they “flung the Tea Party’s favorite coiled snake Gadsden flag and a swastika on the still-warm corpses and then moved to a nearby Walmart to murder a shopper before turning the guns on themselves.”

The reference to the Gadsden flag being “the Tea Party’s favorite” was an obvious effort to link the Tea Party to the murders. The flag dates back to the American Revolution and is used by various groups and people to protest Big Government.

Miller’s notion of “Big Government” was a government that interfered with his marijuana smoking. A simple search of stories about his background revealed a series of confrontations with law enforcement over his drug habits.

Avlon wrote that Miller’s Facebook pages “detail a descent into a murderous rage, railing against a tyrannical government and parroting talking points from fright-wing radio hosts such as Alex Jones and militia movement groups such as the Three Percenters while ‘liking’ the pages of conservative activist groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation to Freedom Works and the NRA. Miller’s profile picture was a skull wearing an American flag bandana against a backdrop of crossed knives over the word ‘Patriot.’”

To lie so consistently and so brazenly takes a remarkable amount of discipline. I commend Cliff Kincaid for his efforts. Once again, groups such as Accuracy in Media demonstrate that the Right-wing echo chamber is akin to a trough urinal where a bunch of men with small penises are complementing each other on their "huge" cocks lingams while mixing the streams of their pee together.

I am not particularly bright. I am also not some genius level Dr. Strange or Doom-like character...although I wish that I was, for there would be much more money in the bank account and far fewer bills.

What I do both consistently and well is "connecting the dots" by focusing on systems of power and following a basic principle that there really is nothing new in the game.

The Right-wing media is following a script designed to satisfy and make comfortable its authoritarian viewers. As such, the Right-wing echo chamber attracts ignorant people whose ignorance is in turn amplified and reinforced by the "news" sources they watch, read, and listen to. Goebbels is smiling. He wrote the playbook. It is hiding in plain sight for anyone who chooses to read it.

18 comments:

supporting marijuana and drug reform does not "firmly put him on the progressive side of the political spectrum"

Libertarians are typically where you find pro-drug, pro-gun, anti-government ideology. At least in the untrained libertarian.

Did you see the libertarian radio host who defended the Las Vegas shooters?

'Kokesh asserted that the slaying of the two officers was not “murder” because police are likely to kill people.

“Let’s say someone is going around stabbing people, like just stabbing people,” he opined. “It’s not murder to kill someone in that situation. And has been pointed out about the Vegas shooting, when you have police officers that are going around and doing violent things all day long, and then they take a break for lunch, well, it doesn’t mean all of the sudden they’re innocent or they’re being peaceful because they’re taking a break from all of their other anti-freedom, rights-violating violence.”

“Think of how many lives might have been saved by this incident. How many people would these cops have killed had they not been killed?” he asked. “We can only hope that some of the officers in America are listening — if you care about your own safety — to understand that you are hurting people, and you can only push them so far before they hit a breaking point.”

Kokesh argued that blaming Jerad and Amanda Miller was “kind of like blaming the victim,”

What's interesting is that he seems to say that these people aren't conservatives not because they killed police officers but because they were pro legalization of the pot. Which implies that conservatives are all about killing police officers.

Part of their mental preparation was that Indiana, where they are from, passed a Stand Your Ground Against the Cops law. Sponsered by the NRA and signed "reluctantly" by Governor Mitch Daniels, now President of Purdue University. It says the folks have the right to use deadly force to resist the Po Po if the folks think the Po Po are out of line.And yes , the conservatives do believe one has the right to kill police . Remember a big part of their guns everywhere argument is that citizens need to be able to respond in kind to the capabilities of the government.

Dostoevsky and George Lukacs criticize this subject of "romantic illegality" whereby the revolutionary rebels against everything, as if all norms and values are suspect and destined to be replaced by their purified ideology.

Its intriguing the way in which pragmatic conservatives reflexively approve of such transparent propaganda. As if the Faustian bargain is necessary to expand their base, morals and ethics notwithstanding. A principled person couldn't get used to waking up in bed with the bride of Frankenstein?

I made this claim with another person earlier this week. It's amazing to see how many of my white friends will post about some police brutality against a white person, rarely ever against a black person.

"Romantic illegality" is often the practice of a radical subgroup like that of Cliven Bundy. Its the attitude that all the norms and values of the current society are wrong so its ok to engage in all manner of illegal acts to hasten the revolution. George Lukacs has an exhaustive article on the subject entitled "Legality and illegality" in his book "History and Class Consciousness."

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Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, The Lost Angeles Blade as well as online magazines and publications such as Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.